I'm surprised to see WA used as an example, because I wasn't aware that there was any effort to enforce the "keep right" regulation. Also, on a related note, I really dislike the left lane exits in Seattle.

I totally get the efficiency argument, but come on, in the real life and the illustrated example the accidents are caused by the douchebags who can't wait and make illegal passes/weaving (seriously, trying to pass a slow driven on the center median?) not directly by the slow drivers pissing them off.

Parked cars keep getting hit near my house. This happens usually, but not always late at night. They come through seeking to avoid traffic on the highway and then drive at highway speeds on residential streets. Except my street is too narrow for highway speeds, even if you are going to run the stops signs (which they clearly do). Except for one really drunk guy, they never catch anybody. I actually witnessed it happening once and it is very hard to get a plate number when the car is going over a hill at 50 mph.

I got a didn't-keep-right ticket driving through Spokane a few months ago. Very annoying because when I'm passing through, I'm not that interested in constant slowing and lane changing to accommodate local traffic.

More of my driving in Europe has been on windy two-lanes than on freeways. I don't think people are going noticeably slower, except in villages, and I don't think the passing etiquette is materially different between say, Germany and France on the one hand and Maryland and Virginia on the other.

I know it's a cliche, but I will say that my experience of driving on the Autobahn* really does suggest better, more attentive drivers. I love it, not because I get to go especially fast, but because everyone around me was clearly and consistently doing the right thing, most obviously getting out of the left lane ASAP. In local driving it's less obvious, but that's at least in party because I myself am in unfamiliar surroundings, so I'm less attuned to the nuances of how others are driving. But the Autobahn is close enough to US highway driving that the differences are very clear to me.

*about 1500 miles in 5 one-day trips, plus another 500-1000 in smaller trips

Also, I'd bet roundabouts make a small, but meaningful, difference. You're basically eliminating high speed, t-bone crashes, and in terms of general traffic flow, you're encouraging reduced speed and greater care instead of trying to beat lights or jackrabbit on the green.

Also, it appears that pedestrian and cyclists account for a good chunk of deaths in the built-up (and more Europe-like*) Northeast, and I'd bet those rates are much, much lower in enlightened toplesslane-separated Europe.

Actually, if you click through the reference in the OP link, the rate measurement comparing the US and Europe is deaths per capita, not per mile driven. So surely half the gap is purely miles driven per capita. I can't look it up, but it wouldn't surprise me if that were 90% of the gap between the US and some of the less-safe other countries*.

And then you look at pedestrian & bike deaths, and that's going to be 90% system design, from narrow, winding village streets that don't permit fatal speeds to protected bike lanes to "Open Streets", where there are no curbs or crosswalks, and drivers are simply expected to go slowly and pay attention. Oh yeah, and universally respected norms around zebra-striped crosswalks.

*Ah, on closer reading: "Even measuring traffic fatality rates based on miles driven instead of population (which makes the sprawling, car-centric U.S. look better), America still has the fifth-worst safety record of the 19 nations."

15.2: Right, it's not just assholes who weave, it's a mass of cars packing together so that, when the tortoise finally moves over, they can get to that open space.

And let's be clear: that's not smart/mature/reasonable behavior, but it's human behavior, and you can't excuse bad behavior/design that enables dumb human behavior. The standard example in transportation circles is the "two lane" suburban street that's 30' wide with no street parking and 25' radius corners and 25 MPH signs. You can put whatever sign up you want, drivers will go the 40 mph that you've designed that street to accommodate.

I mean, look, if the Germans weren't better organized and rule-following than we are, they never could have pulled off the Holocaust. So maybe our traffic fatalities are actually a small, more evenly distributed, price to pay for not being more Germanic.

18: Re: punching cars that don't stop for the cross walk. Have you ever encountered a maniac who brandished a gun/got out and wanted to fight/turned around and tried to run you over? I would think that would be a non-trivial risk.

It's not like I do this at night on empty streets. It's rush hour in a densely packed area. Traffic would make it difficult to turn around and run me over. One guy I yelled at said he was going to get out of the car and fight me, but he didn't. I don't know if he wasn't actually willing to fight or if he was smart enough to realize that he would have had to abandon his car in the traffic lane to fight me (unless I was willing to wait for him to find parking).

The most dangerous slow left driving situations I see are when it causes traffic to bunch up more closely because no one can pass and yet there's lots of open road ahead.

God, this. That traffic bunching is awful--my driving strategy is to be away from other cars as much as possible because cars are dangerous. I hate people who drive slowly in the left lane. Or rather, I should say: I hate when people are not in the right-most lane who are not passing, preparing to exit left, letting someone on, or avoiding an obstruction.

I've done something like twenty three thousand miles on the PA turnpike in the last two years and the people who cannot handle this simple rule are the worst. It might be because they're Ohioans and don't know how to adapt their flatland lives to somewhere with actual terrain relief, or perhaps they're just homicidal morons, but it makes situations that should be trivial to resolve (you want to go 68 mph and I want to go 71? No problem, right?) and make them fraught with peril. Especially if they're talking on their stupid fucking phones.

God, I'm so bitter about this. Maybe because it might kill me for no goddamn good reason.

JRoth's thing about the Autobahn: Yes. Ditto with the UK (mentioned a bit in the other thread). The drivers there are amazingly well trained. It should be a point of national pride that they do the right thing consistently.

Roundabouts are fucking great in every way except land usage (although see mini-roundabouts, which alas don't have all the advantages of real ones). Yes, the two lane ones are complicated and intimidating. Yes, you can learn how to do it. It's amusing to watch Americans go batshit the first time they come across one, though--a few were added on NY Route 13 between Horseheads and Ithaca and I almost saw someone go off the road when they swerved hard going into it.

I wonder if part of it is the testing regime. Scandinavian driving tests are famously quite difficult, and I understand that the UK test is much harder than the sort of thing most people do in the US. So there is a certain minimum threshold everyone has demonstrate early on, which may go some way towards setting expectations.

32: How so? In some intrinsic-to-roundabouts way, or is it due to the Arrakasian driving culture?

35: That's my hypothesis. Hard test, expensive training. In the US, for a large percentage of the population--probably a majority?--a car is essentially necessary for most lifestyles, so it's seen as a birthright you only disallow in the most extreme cases.

A normal speed camera measures how fast you are going when you pass the camera. With averaging cameras there are multiple cameras over a multi-mile stretch of road, and they do you for averaging more than the speed limit over the whole bit.

So you can't do what a lot of people used to do which is hurtle along 20-40mph over the limit and then just slow down as they approach a camera.

35 - yes. This is IMO absolutely huge, and would be reasonably easy to fix in the US (though you'd still have to grandfather in tons of incompetent drivers). The US driver's tests are stunningly, ludicrously easy. I'm probably an extreme case, but took driving instruction from a fly-by-night trademark infringer who gave me samples of the written test and then certified I'd spend like 20 hours in classroom instruction when I'd maybe been there 45 minutes. Then it was maybe a day and a half in a test car, then off to the DMV for a license.

35: No question. This is where Atrios is, in fact, on point in the thing mentioned in the next post: because driving is considered a right of turning 16*, failing kids on their driving tests is tantamount to holding them back a year, and so the tests are super-easy. I'm exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. But there's just no push on anyone's part to make testing rigorous.

38.1 I suspect it's a combination of both. And they make traffic terrible here. There are a single lane ones I've seen that are ok but most are 2 and 3 lane and they're mostly terrible. The 3 lane ones universally so.

On crossing streets in Pittsburgh: It sucks in a lot of places. I'm often afraid to cross at crosswalks so I have a ritual where I'll approach the crosswalk but try to look like I'm not interested in crossing, and then wait to cross until all traffic has passed. The problem is that there's a bimodal distribution between drivers who will stop--and gum up traffic--and people who don't give a fuck and will run you over, and getting both of them at once is dangerous.

There's a five way intersection near my house, with stop signs, on a hill that has persistent flow across the direction I want to cross. Drivers use it as a short-cut so they tend not to be respectful of pedestrians. Annoying. To compound issues, the road after it has a *one mile long* section with no crosswalks or stop signs, and there's a major park on the other side. Inconceivable.

43: I don't think I've ever used a three lane one, but the double lane ones I've used in the UK (and Barbados, and maybe NZ) were all great. Get where you want to go, fairly quickly, via a beautiful and improbable dance.

I think for example, of things like right of way at junctions and roundabouts, and so on. I rely on knowledge of those every day to make decisions, and if i make the wrong one, it makes a crash much more likely. All of the basic knowledge for those is things I learned for my test.

That said, I do encounter drivers fairly regularly who pretty clearly just don't know. They aren't driving like deliberate arseholes, they are just driving like people who just don't know (at all) that the person coming from their right on a roundabout has right of way over them.*

I'd guess many of those are people who passed their test in a country with different rules.

49: The first time I was in a two-lane roundabout (in Barbados--there's only two or three in the entire county) I didn't understand that the right (centermost) lane get the right of way and damn near caused a crash. It was easy to learn, but it's not in our driving culture at all (even though they're becoming more popular in the US, especially in the Midwest).

the person coming from their right on a roundabout has right of way over them.
I was all, WTF are you talking about then I realized you're in a wrong-side country so I had to reverse it.
There's an easier way to think about it for multi-lane roundabouts. The closer to the middle you are the higher your priority. So if you are the middle and want to get out, people are supposed to yield to you. Likewise if you're not in the rotary you have to yield to people who are.

52: Looking at a diagram for one of those and my god, it's beautiful, yet so intimidating. Like, hell, there could be road pirates hiding somewhere in there, just waiting for me to stumble into its dangerous currents.

the 'don't cruise in the left lane' thing is insane. Every freeway around here is way to full (excepting 10pm-6am) to have all the cars that are not currently passing fit in the right lane. Even if they could, it woudl exacerbate people driving ~1 carlength behind the car in front of them, which is probably the main thing responsible for highway accidents.

So if you are the middle and want to get out, people are supposed to yield to you
"Supposed to" is doing a lot of work here. The MA examples of multi-lane roundabouts are probably not great examples, but they're so small that I never feel like I have room to set up/negotiate a lane change safely.

56: That's how I think about it, and I did have to flip my view to get how ttaM put it.

58: So you move left, with a slightly increased speed, to get around the cars in front of you? Sounds good to me. If you aren't doing that, you're part of the problem. Yes, there may be enough other people fucking up the system that it doesn't work well and there's nothing you can do to right it, but that doesn't mean they aren't doing it wrong.

Maybe I'm miscommunicating. I don't think traffic should only be in the right lane! I think the left and center lanes should be well used since cars generally will be going at slightly (or very) different speeds. But there should be a filter effect where at (almost) all times, if lane N+k is closer to the median than lane N, the speed of travel in lane N+k should be greater than the speed in lane N. At some point the people in N+k should be moving right when space opens up, but it might not any time soon, and they only complete the pass when they move right to exit (modulo nasty wrong-side exits).

If you're going some very low speed because it's bumper-to-bumper traffic--which, yes, commonly happens here, too--I'll admit that's a different circumstance, but I could still argue that it's logical attempted passing.

I was trying to be rules-of-the-road agnostic by mathing it up and failed. I'm going to go back to using USA-centric drive-on-right terms. (I also thought it might be useful to note the the on-the-face-of-it stronger but equivalent statement that lane N+k should be faster than lane N, not just than N+1 should be faster than lane N--the right lane should be slowest, then the next lane faster, the next lane faster than that, etc.)

I don't think we're in disagreement, which is heartening, we're just talking past each other. In my view, passing doesn't require getting back over if there's no space to get back over. You're allowed to pass a block of vehicles all at once; you don't have to leapfrog each in succession. It's possible that that block might stretch for miles. You just have to 1) be going faster than the vehicle you're passing, and 2) don't leave a meaningful void to your right, where "meaningful" is speed dependent. As a rule of thumb, if someone could pass you on the right without doing something suicidal, you should move over.

Does anyone ever know that they're a bad driver? People love to complain that everyone else on the road are idiots, but it's pretty rare for anyone to come out and say that they are also one of those idiots. And yet, statistically, many (most?) of us must be.

I think that driving must be one of those areas in which the Dunning-Kruger effect is especially pronounced. I have a friend (who is an exemplary individual in many other ways, but) who is famous within our peer group for being a terrible driver. Like, the worst possible combination of traits -- simultaneously reckless and inattentive to the point where she slows down or weaves when she's engrossed in conversation; super-aggressive and has a hair-trigger temper; and texts and even checks e-mail while driving. She gets into accidents constantly. And yet she once told me that she considers herself an exceptionally good driver. I was speechless.

Anyway, I think I'm not a bad driver, but I'm also aware that I'm not all that great. The autobahn doesn't sound fun to me because I suspect that an environment where everyone is consistently doing the right thing would not be the right place for me.

I'm probably a bad driver. Like, I would guess 35-40% percentile. I often drive too fast, sometimes as the result of irrational emotional decisions--well, I want to get around that car, and they sped up so I have to speed up, but now if I get back over and slow down I'm going to screw stuff up, might as well go fast, etc. This leads me to alternate between being too passive and too aggressive. I usually drive alone but if I have other people in the car I need to force myself to not talk about anything that requires heavy mental processing. I get more inconsistent when I've been on the road for hours and it's after midnight. Sometimes I'm slow about pulling out/shifting lanes because I triple-check things (except when I don't). So I'd say the big issue with my driving is a lack of consistency.

On the other hand, I haven't been in an accident since high school (cosmetic damage, < 20mph hit in a city), and no moving violation tickets since college, maybe 120,000 miles ago. But I do think it's something I need to work on improving.

The great thing about the autobahn is that there's an easy way to do the right thing: stay right, go slow.

The truth is that unless you kill or injure yourself, or kill or injure someone else, delusionally overconfident driving is the best. Watch me get over to that exit in 3 seconds! BOOM! You can't block me, other car! I'm a daredevil! Life is fun!

Yes! I am a bad driver! Tons of people will admit to it, unfortunately without any benefit to quality of driving on the roads. I've only been in one real accident, during a very ill-advised highway drive when I was unlicensed (permit), but I've had a couple of near misses.

I've been self-conscious about being a bad driver all my life -- it's counterproductive because it inhibits conditioning yourself to drive well. It's one of those areas where you need a certain amount of unearned confidence before you can be successful.

65. is super-interesting. More than just ego is present-- since driving means freedom and lifestyle support in much of the US, admitting even internally to being a bad driver would have adverse consequences.

I was going to argue I'm good because I haven't gotten a ticket, haven't been in an accident, and have had near misses avoided through my own skill when someone else fucked up. But then admitted bad drivers 68 and 72 ruined my argument.

One thing about the deal where most people (not here!) think they're above-average drivers is that some portion of bad drivers genuinely believe that their bad driving is precisely what makes them good. I guarantee that half the people who clog up the left lane going the speed limit are extremely proud of themselves for preventing the other maniacs from speeding. Same deal with ostentatiously full stops*. And aside from smug jerks, you get drivers (thinking of a specific friend) who know that they're not especially good and compensate by driving slowly, and who probably believe that, on net, they're safer than better, faster drivers. But, hoo boy, they're not, because even slow driving requires more attentiveness than they seem to be able to bring to the task. But anyway, both of those categories are full of people who mistake "safe" driving for good driving (and are also mistaken about the former).

There's probably also a significant portion of drivers who were, in fact good when they were younger, but don't appreciate how much their skills have deteriorated, even as they may acknowledge that they have. Self-assessment is hard.

*which I doubt cause any significant number of accidents, but also decrease efficiency without any meaningful increase in safety

Judging from an ex, bad driving is also something you can easily recognize in others but not in yourself. I think the truth is that no one really knows what *actual* bad driving is, they just know what makes them uncomfortable or pisses them off. And since pretty much only other drivers are going to do those things, only other drivers can be bad in most peoples' eyes.

I would certainly not describe myself as a great driver. I drive a lot of miles by UK standards, so I have a certain basic mechanical car-handling competence that comes from driving thousands of miles a month, and I drive a lot in a big city, on motorways, and on small country roads, so I encounter most of the things that might come, often. So I'm not a physically incompetent driver in the way that some are. That sounds a bit like a humblebrag. But ...

... on the other hand, I'm aware that a lot of the time I'm driving tired, I'm capable of being inattentive, and I can think of at least a couple of times in the past year where I've avoided a crash through luck, not judgement, and where, if there had been a crash, it'd have been my open stupid fault rather than the fault of someone else. I've had one crash with another vehicle in 26 years of driving, and it was a low speed thing that involved some minor bodywork damage. But ... it was arguably my fault (and it was certainly my fault from the insurance point of view). The other person was going too fast for the road conditions, and I didn't see them, but I should have done, and I wasn't paying proper attention.

Ooh, accident tally! Distinguish between fender-benders and those requiring towing.

I was objectively a bad driver a few years after moving where I now live while my kid was a toddler, had three fender-benders in 3 years that were my fault. 12 years of incident-free driving since, though 1 nasty bike accident 2 years ago. Not my fault, other guy got cited, but defensively optimal behavior for me would have been to slow down because there was traffic.

My oddest parallel parking was one time when I bumped in a really tight spot, got out to check and I was touching the cars on both sides. I must have not realized I bumped the first and actually pushed it a bit, then bumped the other. I'm sure everyone who walked by it thought those other people were assholes for blocking me in.

My ex and I were taking a road trip and I volunteered to help drive despite lacking a license, because I felt guilty about free-riding. I ended up rear-ending a parked car as we left the truck stop (they grinned and waved me off, low speed, no harm done). On the road, I-90 through Indiana, I began to drift toward a semi and my ex grabbed the wheel and wrenched it left. We fought over the wheel for a bit without conscious mind interfering, spun the car around and skidded across the median ditch and backwards into oncoming traffic lanes, which were momentarily clear, then down again into the ditch, at which point he tersely reminded me that the car had brakes. The car had some alignment problems and a chronically flat tire for the rest of the trip but was otherwise unharmed. My ex bought a lottery ticket. I didn't drive much after that for about a decade, although I did get my license three years later through sheer miserable force of will and shame.

Hah, I just drove 10 hours on Route 80, Cleveland to NY, and I'm probably a below-average driver, given my very low lifetime mileage. I mean, I'm driving the speed of traffic, and I'm reliably not being emotionally aggravated about anything, but I definitely get into situations where I'm puzzled about what I should be doing, and my judgment about what size gap in traffic I can pull out into is for shit. (That is, a while back I realized I was way over conservative, to the point of being annoying to people behind me. Then I consciously tried to be more aggressive about it, and made a couple of bad calls -- no contact, but other drivers having to brake hard. So I'm back to conservatism.)

Anyway, the above discussion was very reassuring. I was in the left lane a fair amount, and felt self-conscious about it until I got to 63, which precisely describes my intent when I'm in the left lane -- at all times hoping to get back right when I'm past the current block of unreasonable slowness.

My first time driving in CA I was informed by my CA native passenger that drivers there consider this rule to apply to the HOV lane as well so I damn well better go faster than cars in the left most standard lane, which was going about 90. This was between San Diego and LA.

Two lifetime accidents involving other cars, both my fault. The first I'm sure I mentioned, was right before HS GF dumped me, I was driving to visit her in Baltimore in the rain, the lane I was in abruptly became a parking lane, the car I was in had even worse brakes than I thought. I totaled both cars (and came to a rest in exactly the place where I would have parked, had I realized exactly where I was). Since then, one fender-bender when the car in front of me put on its left signal, I went to pass on the right, and it turned into me. The worst thing about that--aside from the fact that it was my dad's new convertible--was that it happened in slow motion: I saw the car start to go right, I started yelling, "No, no!", but I was already alongside it with nowhere to go.

Yeah. How good you are at it depends on how often you do it. When I lived in Glasgow, and a few years ago when xelA was a baby and we lived elsewhere, I lived on a narrow street where you had to parallel park in very tight spots. At that time, I was quick and smooth into those spaces.

Now, I live somewhere where parking is tight, but you have to reverse into a space where the cars are parallel, not nose to tail.

And I discovered recently that my parallel parking has gone to shit. But gone to shit means that it takes me longer and I'm adjusting the angle and going back and forth a couple of times, not that I actually touch the other cars.

My first time driving in CA I was informed by my CA native passenger that drivers there consider this rule to apply to the HOV lane as well so I damn well better go faster than cars in the left most standard lane, which was going about 90. This was between San Diego and LA.

This is absolutely right.

Personally, I have world-class level horrible depth perception, which makes me a bad parallel parker (though of course I don't routinely bump other cars, what the hell is that). The terrible depth perception also makes it completely impossible for me to be a "good" driver, but I drive enough and enjoy it enough to be a self-assessed OK driver, except when distracted. Really, it's all just about looking far enough in front of you, not being distracted, and having some basic sense of when to accelerate and what your turn radius is like. That's about it. No fender benders, a few times when I've fucked up my own car parking (see depth perception issue, above) and one actually pretty bad totalling the car accident where I'm still not totally sure what happened -- I think a tire blew out when I was on the freeway and I spun out. Thanks airbags!

The looking far enough ahead of you thing is really important. I was taught that in a motorcycle safety class and it was a revelation, but it really works -- look far ahead into the distance and react to things coming into your view, rather than just a little bit in front of you.

I thought no one had literal depth perception more than a yard or so out -- your eyes are too close together for the necessary parallax. I mean, there's some perceptual skill, but it's different from what makes a 3D movie 3D.

Looking far out is huge -- I had a friend tell me that right after I got my license ("You're not going to forget there's a car in front of you if you take your eyes off its bumper.") and it was one of those two sentence bits of advice that sticks with you forever.

How *good* can someone really be driving automatic? I think there's just "in an accident" or "fine." I'm shamed in my family for not driving stick or doing coast-to-coast in three days non-stop and to hear them talk there's art involved in those things but beyond that it's like saying you're good at boiling water. Duh the left is the passing lane and was this guy raised by actual wolves insofar he ever believed otherwise, but also whether or not you frustrate other drivers is not a good measure of skill.

Half dozen serious accidents, left the road at speed maybe a dozen times without injury, once after losing a front wheel. Often no citation because unreported. The time with the wheel I ran a quarter mile after it, and put it back on with a lugnut from each of the other wheels despite a wrecked drive train, so written up as a breakdown, not an accident.

My parents both have (well, had, decades ago when they drove more and better) strong beliefs about driving skill -- all the standard good behavior stuff, but idiosyncratic about thinking braking is kind of shameful unless either you were planning to slow or stop, or someone in front of you did something alarming. You should always be aware enough of the space around you and be leaving enough space that any speed adjustments can be done by taking your foot off the gas (highway driving, they weren't crazy). (Well, they both were, but not on that front.)

I'm generally unskillful, but I do judge other drivers for being jerky in a way my parents would have disapproved of.

100 oh I possess volumes of inherited (sometimes delusional) driving etiquette and judge other drivers harshly, 9-yo has been wondering what a "dildomaster" is since I shrieked it at someone slow in the left actually. It's just that most of that judgment is misplaced and and other drivers are thinking the same things about me, which I've decided not to worry about. Just pay it forward.

I think you only notice a good driver when you're a passenger, because you don't get an extended sample of other drivers when you're driving. A moment is enough to spot a bad driver, but you need ten minutes or so to appreciate skill.

I suppose I spun out on the ice near Gallup and felt really skillful for handling the skid but on the other hand it probably only happened because I forgot to take the parking brake off so cancels out.

I've learned that repeatedly on my daily commute. There's two spots on the M40, on my daily drive, where because of the queue building up from the M25 (and the bit where the M40 becomes that A40 on the way into London ) and spilling out from the exit lane into the other three,* traffic sometimes goes from 75 to 0 mph in a stupidly short distance -- as in brake-challengingly short. You need to be watching really far out (a mile or so) for brake lights going on, otherwise, it's going to be too late. I've seen so many crashes there. Luckily, never me, but I've been close a few times where even braking really hard and fishtailing slightly I've only just stopped in time. And that is with paying attention, as I know it's likely.

* often caused by dickwads speeding up the outside and then cutting across to find there's no gap to go into and having to brake suddenly and stop blocking a lane.

A sort of fair point but there's so much you can do besides finessing the gear box. And while you probably can't be a *great* driver with a slushbox (excluding, you know, Ferrari paddle-shifters or whatever) there is certainly a wide variety of landing points you can fall into between "horrible" and "pretty good."

When my wife and I first started dating, she was unambiguously a better driver than me, in many respects. Better car control at speed on tight roads, smoother handling, etc. She used to rocket around the backroads where she lived, and I was never nervous as a passenger, as I always felt she was in control. And I'd not have been (at the time) as confident or skillful a driver in those conditions. But ... put her on roads she didn't know, or in heavy traffic, or urban driving, and the situation would have been reversed. Where what mattered wasn't car-handling skill, but anticipation, and being unflustered when someone did something unexpected. Being a 'good' driver probably involves both types of skill.

Once the city put a barrier blocking a steep portion of the street near my house because they were unable or unwilling to remove the ice. Rather than go a half mile around, I drove past the barrier and went down the hill as slow as I could. I started sliding uncontrollably until I turned the wheel to try to slow down by pointing the car uphill. This started a wild spin. Then, I slammed into the curb, stopping right at the bottom. No damage.

I'm trying to think if I've ever seen another driver on the road and been like, "wow that driver is really good."

I have, in fact, had this happen, but certainly not often (partly because, like the best athletes, the best drivers make it look easy*).

Last weekend, driving back form a short camping trip, I saw an Acura make an emergency swerve around a retread that came lose right in front of it, and I wasn't sure whether to credit the car or driver more: it honestly seemed like a move that was more dangerous than taking a pice of tread in the grill, but there was also no wildness to the driving, and I don't know whether it was excellent control by the driver, who know that the car could handle the move, or the car ably responding to spastic input.

*that sounds facetious or silly, but it's basically true. Spotting that the car 100 yards ahead and 1 lane over is about to do something hinky, and so laying off the gas and maybe moving over a lane, is something that would be invisible to another driver unless they were both attentive and in a position to observe the whole thing unfold.

I remember being in a car with a friend, when we were in our teens, and we hit some black ice, on a roundabout in quite busy traffic. And even though the car spun, he managed to get it to the side of the road, without hitting other cars, and under control. I was in the car with the same guy, when we came over a hill to find someone had put a plank of wood at head-height, across the road.* He managed to both spot the obstacle (which was hard to see) and to stop the car in an amazingly short distance.

Both times, genuine car control skill on display. The guy was a bit of knob when driving (too fast, too aggressive) but he could undeniably drive a car.

I thought no one had literal depth perception more than a yard or so out -- your eyes are too close together for the necessary parallax. I mean, there's some perceptual skill, but it's different from what makes a 3D movie 3D.

My drawing education, let me show it to you:

There are 3 forms of primary perspective/depth perception: binocular vision, depth of focus, and another one.

But there are IIRC 8 forms of secondary depth perception: superposition, horizontal position, relative size, aerial perspective*, motion parallax.... I used to know them cold.

Wiki disagrees with these numbers, and uses some that I don't think quite apply, but anyway, my point is that even "literal" depth perception isn't limited by binocular stereopsis. I don't know whether poor depth perception is more about mechanical or cognitive shortcomings, but there's no particular reason to think that understanding secondary perspectival cues would be a universal skill. Presumably it's one that can be taught/enhanced, but like anything else in the brain, some will have it more than others.

Apparently studies have shown that suburban/rural kids are worse at depth perception because there are fewer perspectival cues (eg street grid, consistent vanishing points, etc). Also worse at sense of direction skills and mapping, but that's hardly surprising (the latter applies to suburban, not rural, I'd think, since it's derived from loopy suburban streets + being driven places, which isn't the rural condition).

Have I mentioned that my mom's accident was, I'm convinced, mostly a failure of secondary perspectival cues? She was hit by a one-headlight, jacked-up pickup truck as she attempted to turn left in front of it. The absence of the second headlight would have deprived her of a distance cue, and the elevated height would have made it appear closer to the horizon, and thus father away.

Any else have the pleasure of participating in a fatal accident? Not my fault, but kind of ruined my week. Two cars going in opposite directions on a 40 mph street. other driver turned left
without looking or without seeing my car was going the opposite way. I ploughed into the passenger side door. The passenger was the other driver's 90 year old mother. seatbelt, front airbag, no side airbag. She was on an oxygen tank before the crash. She was taken by an ambulance, did not appear bloody or hurt, died in her sleep at the hospital that night. I found out the last part from a police report several days later.

Also both cars totaled, neither driver injured. Deployed airbags smell quite unpleasant. No lawsuit, and the other guy's insurance paid for my car. I avoided that street, quickest way to several places I often go, for a few years.

The first time I thought I was being made fun of because the driver had seen me make some fumbles in cheek kissing-etiquette and it could have been "alors! We also kiss new cars when we meet them," which would have been cute. But then I kept hearing it. I suppose the entire country could have hopped on Minitel and coordinated for the purpose of gently teasing me, as likely as anything.

98. I drove a stick for decades and I honestly don't think it has anything to do with being a better driver. I switched to an automatic with my current car because most of my driving is in the ever increasingly congested northeast, and having to do the shifting constantly was tiresome as hell.

If you are driving in the left lane and someone passes you on the right, you are doing it wrong. I know people who claim they are saving gas (you can save it just as easily a lane or two over), or that they are helping keep speeds down (that isn't your job unless you have a badge), but mostly they just aren't paying attention.

If you look in your rear view mirror and you've developed an entourage, get the hell over. This is true even if the idiot behind you is tailgating you or otherwise being a moron at 75mph. In fact, it's doubly true in that case: you do not want to be near other drivers who are idiots. Since most other drivers are idiots (or you may be an idiot yourself!) the best policy is to try to stay out of packs (joint probability of idiocy is high) and stay away from people who think I95 is LeMans.

I do hate it when you want to drive 70-75 and every lane but the left is below 65, and everyone in the left wants 80+. I used to drive 80 in the left in that case but now I stay out of the left except to pass.

driving slightly too slow is more dangerous than slightly too fast
I don't think this is true. Fatality rates grow pretty quickly with speed, more than making up the slight asymmetry in accident likelihood around prevailing traffic speeds.

Bumper heights have become so non-standard in the US that kissing has become impractical. If you try to park a Hyundai Accent behind an F-150, the bumpers aren't going to match up and trying to kiss would get you a dent in the hood. Even more so if the F-150 has a trailer hitch.

I don't know why trucks and SUVs are able to get away with having bumpers like that, but it strikes me as dangerous.

Trucks aren't required to have bumpers at all. There's some loophole for farm equipment that they fall under. The same is probably true for SUVs, which are considered trucks for most of this sort of thing.

Here's another hypothesis, supported by data. Road designs for newer US cities are more dangerous. Assuming older cities have road designs more similar to European cities, this would explain the discrepancy.https://www.cnu.org/node/5697
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Trucks aren't required to have bumpers at all. There's some loophole for farm equipment that they fall under. The same is probably true for SUVs, which are considered trucks for most of this sort of thing.

When 50% of suburban traffic is pickup trucks and SUVs, it might be time to rethink that "farm equipment" exemption. Maybe European roads are safer because everybody isn't driving around in farm equipment.

If you look in your rear view mirror and you've developed an entourage, get the hell over.

I suppose there's an exception to this: when a long line of cars are trying to pass someone slow on the right. It might be the case that the person in front is passingly slowly, or just due to a hill or curves passing safely takes a while. Especially if it's a truck or two being passed. When this occurs I might see a particularly antisocial behavior where you have five cars on the left queued up to pass, then someone zooms up on the right and veers over to cut in for most of the passing group. How I hate that, and I might aggressively close ranks to prevent this behavior. This is not mature of me.

I suppose you could argue that we should be zip merging, but a moving zip merge isn't part of the driving culture here, and even then I still think queueing up in the left lane is the legally sanctioned behavior.

Maybe European roads are safer because everybody isn't driving around in farm equipment.

Probably. SUVs are antisocial dipshit mobiles. Any reasonable argument for them works better for a pickup with full-size cab, and even then most people don't need those.

On trucknutz: On one of my recent trips I saw what could only have been improvised trucknutz. On the trailer hitch was a very heavy chain, with two impractically large nuts--in the "nuts and bolts" sense--of maybe three inches in diameter strung on it. One hung slightly lower than the other. It was amazing.

More's the pity. There are few places that try to encourage it, and I've run into a few (even in "me above all" New England) where local culture performs it, during rush hours only. (Because the same people do the same merge every day and it works and they are used to it. Outside rush hour it's back to normal, alas.)

To clarify I don't mean a zip merge at a fixed location, I mean in the case where a lot of traffic is trying to pass a slow but moving truck. The usual circumstance I see is that all the traffic is already in the left lane, leaving a multi-car-length void in the right lane behind the truck. Thus leaving space for complete wastes of humanity to take advantage of safe following distances.

Regular zip merges are starting to become a thing here, though. They're entirely intuitive during stand-still traffic but I still feel uncomfortable about them at speed with low/moderate traffic density; I have a propensity to get over early (or I'll already be there because it's the right lane).

The Europeans I know who both drive and get drunk [which, now that I'm actually thinking about it, is a smaller intersection than I initially figured. Here is where Atrios would mention the awesome public transportation in European cities.] are more likely to do both at the same time than the corresponding Americans in my life.

If a car was located such that he needed the signal to know whether it was turning left or right, that means there was only one lane of traffic in the direction they were traveling. Which (if I'm understanding right) means that he was swinging around it on the shoulder, before it had started getting over to the left for the left turn he thought it was making at all.

That's not particularly weird driving, and it was in reliance on the wrong left-turn signal the other car was making, but you're not supposed to drive outside the marked lanes to get around a car stopped in front of you without being super careful about it, which it doesn't sound as if he was.

Tl:dr -- not really bad driving, but I can see an argument that he was also in the wrong.

Belatedly, my worst driving ever: I was driving too fast on a wide, wet road which formed the top bar of a T-junction. From the side road a bus emerged, turning to the right (US=left), across my own lane. I realized I was going too fast, so if I tried to brake I'd t-bone the bus. Making the only option to accelerate, swing into the right(left)-hand lane (which possible, because no oncoming traffic) and swerve around the front of the oncoming bus back into my own lane. Which I successfully did, and like to imagine I looked calm collected doing it. But fuckfuckfuck. I'm getting chills now just thinking about it.

Yeah, I know almost no-one who would drive after anything other than a tiny amount of alcohol (one beer, one small glass of wine). And that includes people who happily break the law in multitudes of other ways. I think at some point in the late 70s through to mid 80s the war was basically won. Drink driving is just not a thing, at least among people my age and younger.

My mum won't, because she didn't learn to drive until thirty years ago, but my FIL will drive after a couple of glasses of wine, and it pisses me off. My alcoholic MIL won't drink at all before she has to drive somewhere, I assume she realises it would be a dangerously slippery slope.

164:Pretty sure you're joking, but can't tell how much. My cutoff would be way before eight bottles of beer, even if it's Yuengling. Eight drinks would be a guaranteed hangover and probably well into and out of giddy drunk. For driving I'd say no more than one non-fully-processed drink--so two drinks might be okay if I wait an hour and a half or so.

156 is exactly right. I don't feel that it resulted from "bad driving"* on my part, but I was clearly at fault (I actually had to be told by the cop that, every time one goes around a turning vehicle in the shoulder, one is breaking the law; this is probably an instance where autonomous vehicles will confound the expectations and norms of human drivers).

*in the sense of careless, reckless, inattentive, or unskillful. But it wasn't defensive driving, either.